The night before the final day of this year’s CrossFit Games, Sam Briggs had a dream.

“Wouldn’t it be so awesome if we swept the podium: one, two and three?” she asked Lindsey Valenzuela and Valerie Voboril. Both Valenzuela and Voboril train at DogTown CrossFit, and Briggs spent time there before the Games.

Briggs’ dream became reality: she finished first, with Valenzuela second and Voboril third.

But going into the competition, 35-year-old Voboril had no expectations. And she didn’t look at the Leaderboard once. If she worried about her rank, she says, she wouldn’t be having fun.

“If I want to be successful, I just have to go out and give it my 100 percent,” says Voboril, who has a 1-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

“I’m a lot more present, I feel like, since I’ve had daughter,” she says. “Being strong or being fit, I felt like, was one of the only things that defined me. And now it’s nice that that’s not the only thing that defines me. So it takes a little bit of the pressure off, in a sense.”

Voboril adds: “It’s cool that I can be a mom, I can be a dedicated full-time teacher, and I can still be a high-level competitive athlete.”

Although it shared its weekend with four other events, the Central East Regional was the show-stopper. The competitors’ names alone were enough to pique the interest of even the casual CrossFit Games… Continue Reading

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